Talk presented at ECEM 2022, Leicester
Bernhard Angele¹, Ismael Gutiérrez Cordero², Manuel Perea³ and Ana Marcet³
1. Bournemouth University, UK; 2. University of Málaga; 3. University of Valencia
What does a comma do. I have refused them so often and left them out so much and did without them so continually that I have come finally to be indifferent to them. I do not now care whether you put them in or not but for a long time I felt very definitely about them and would have nothing to do with them. As I say commas are servile and they have no life of their own,and their use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s own interest and I do decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what I am doing. A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only now I do not pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading.
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (1935)
Two main purposes:
Signal the “covert prosody” of written language (Chafe, 1988)
Indicate the syntactic structure of a sentence
Commas can indicate where a clause ends, which leads to longer eye-movements at that location (Rayner et al., 2000)
Disambiguate ambiguous sentences, e.g. garden-path sentences (Frazier & Rayner, 1982)
Hirotani et al. (2006) found that using non-mandatory commas seemed to facilitate overall reading compared to omitting commas, although there were higher dwell times ahead of the commas.
There is not much else information about the effect of commas – mandatory or not –on eye movements
Paula no podrá irse de la clase, aunque acabe el examen pronto.
Paula cannot leave the classroom, even if she finishes the exam soon.
Critical areas:
Comma
Post-comma 1
Post-comma 2
Quiero contarles una cosa importante a mis abuelos, aunque no lo voy a hacer.
I want to tell an important thing to my grandparents, although I won’t do it.
Critical areas:
Comma
Post-comma 1
Post-comma 2
Siempre se le veía entrenando y, finalmente, consiguió ganar el campeonato.
We always watched him practicing and, finally, he managed to win the championship.
Critical areas:
Comma 1
Comma 2
Post-comma
Este año hemos viajado a Bruselas, Lanzarote y Toledo y nos ha gustado mucho.
This year we have traveled to Brussels, Lanzarote and Toledo and we have liked it a lot.
Critical areas:
Element 1 (comma)
Element 2
Element 3 (and)
Mis dos tortugas, Paula y Alba, tienen más de siete años.
My two turtles, Paula and Alba, are more than seven years old.
Critical areas:
Pre-incision (Comma 1)
Incision (Comma 2)
Post-incision
If we ask participants to read sentences of these types with the commas omitted:
If mandatory commas are optional and do not confer a benefit to experienced readers, we should see no difference in overall sentence reading times between no comma and control.
Mandatory commas may only be critical for comprehension in certain syntactic constructions, but not in others. In this case, we would observe the comma benefit effect only for some of the sentence types introduced.
-.5; absent = .5